African Psycho
Alain Mabanckou
(translated by Christine Schwartz Hartley)
Serpent’s Tail, 2007
I have decided to kill Germaine on December 29. I have been thinking about it for weeks… killing someone requires both psychological and logistical preparedness.’
So muses Gregoire, the anti-hero of African Psycho, a novel about life and death in an unnamed central African city, and the first novel translated into English by the Congolese author Alain Mabanckou.
There is a certain disconcerting logic to Gregoire’s decision to turn to murder as the path to fame: if one aspires to greatness, the chosen route would inevitably depend upon the means and opportunities that avail themselves. For Gregoire, the options are limited: an abandoned child, his upbringing alternated between abusive foster homes and the grim harshness of the streets. So why not aspire to the notoriety accorded to one who commits a sadistic murder?
Gregoire’s chosen role model is the scandalous, deceased Angoualima, a feared serial killer reputed to possess twelve fingers and an unmatched reputation for unspeakable cruelty, a man reputed to have left a Cuban cigar in the mouth of one victim’s severed head, and twenty five of the same in… Well, there isn’t really any need to go into too much detail. Throughout the novel, Gregoire has conversations with his dead hero, and discusses with him his grisly plans.
Mabanckou, presently resident in Los Angeles and working as a lecturer in Literature at UCLA, paints a disconcertingly bleak vision of life for the dispossessed in the margins of his unnamed city, and a convincing psychosocial portrait of a man who has convinced himself that he is on the cusp of greatness, but who actually may be balanced precariously on the brink of madness. It’s the story of a man who seeks to elevate himself from anonymity to greatness with the only tool at his disposal: the crushing force of meticulously planned and carefully orchestrated violence.
Sardonic black humour laces the narrative: Gregoire’s neighbourhood is called He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot, the despised policemen are described as ‘protected criminals’, and the manifold watering holes bear insalubrious names like Drinking Makes You Hard, You Break Your Glass You Buy It, No Problem We’ll Worry About It Later and Even The President Drinks, drinking dens frequented by the whores and rogues of the city. It is in one of these that our protagonist meets Germaine, who becomes his intended victim.
Germaine is a prostitute; she succumbs to Gregoire’s malevolent interest, something that she mistakes for love or some close approximation. She moves into his modest home and offers to give up her unpleasant but lucrative nocturnal activities for him. In his mind, he dominates her.
It isn’t really a surprise that he selects Germaine as his victim: his choice embodies the classic post-Freudian concept of accepting a loved object into one’s life in order only to kill it, a psychic means of avenging oneself against an unfeeling world – except, in this case, Gregoire literally means to kill her.
The bold, brutal prose recalls both Camus’s The Outsider and Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, but is the author’s own: the city, the people, and Gregoire, whom the reader wishes well despite the natural revulsion at his base intentions. One does not, cannot hope that he succeeds in committing his perfect murder, but instead that he can find a way out of the trap he has created and placed himself within.
